New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, newsletter

by Candace Barrington

Robert Simola has not only graciously shared the 225-page catalogue recording his collection of 3,500 – 4,000 Chaucer editions, print, audio recordings, and Chauceriana, but also welcomes visitors who wish to see his collection.

His catalogue can be accessed here. And you can enjoy his account of the collection’s history below.

by Robert Simola

My Chaucer collection has 3,000 to 4,000 books, prints, recordings, and Chauceriana. I have most of the printed editions from Caxton to the present although I only have facsimiles of editions printed before 1550. I also have full size, full color facsimiles of fifteen of the Chaucer manuscripts so if someone requires access to specific Chaucer editions, translations, retellings, or adaptions, come and visit.

I am, or at least I was, a high school English teacher who continually creates mental plans for grandiose gardens that rival the great gardens of Europe. I make soap and can my own tomato sauce. I’m also a wood carver who makes wood block prints and wood engravings, a binder of books, a poet, an arborist, a miller, a baker, a fool. AND I am an accidental collector of books by and about Chaucer; and even though I will occasionally splurge on something that is really out of my price range, most years I find collecting Chaucer to be cheaper than playing golf. It also has benefits not found out on a golf course. My books never get lost in the tall grass bordering the fairways. I never get mad because my books have hooked or sliced, and at the end of the day my books are worth much more than an inaccurate score card that has been ether forgotten in a golf bag or thrown in a trash can.

I might give myself the delusions of being a Chaucerian manqué or at my most grandiose, a Don Quixote de la Chaucer tilting not at windmills with a shaving basin on my head, but one who slashes his way through dust-covered, unbound books forgotten in the backs of out-of-the-way used book stores looking for The Book of the Lion or an unknown, original manuscript of The Canterbury Tales.

My interest in Chaucer started with an interest in Chaucer’s usage of the final –e after going to Dartmouth for an NEH Chaucer seminar with Peter Travis. But my collection started  when I acquired a beautiful copy of the Urry Chaucer, known far and wide as the worst Chaucer ever made.

Others may watch movies about the conquest of Everest and imagine themselves climbing that mountain single handedly without Sherpas or oxygen or perhaps read a book and become that one man who emerges unscathed after saving the world from invading hordes of aliens against incredible odds. Still others might take on the leader of the Tour de France mano-a-mano and break him on the highest mountain climb in the Pyrenees or dream of having so much money that even Bill Gates is poor by comparison. My impossible dream is being able to own every edition of Chaucer’s works ever made.

Unfortunately Chaucer has turned out to be something of a bully. He has continually needed more space until now he takes up most of my library. Literary theory, history, books on teaching and education, art and design, wood carving and book binding, my science fiction collection, and most of the rest have all had to go to make room for Chaucer’s insatiable appetite for space.

I collect Chaucer editions and material associated with Chaucer because I find him to be a most humane writer, and I am endlessly fascinated with the way he has been received and ignored over the centuries. In one part of my collection I have something in excess of one hundred and fifty Victorian and Edwardian editions from various publishers. In most cases, the covers are beautifully embossed and decorated in greens, reds, yellows, browns, or black with the edges gilt and gilt lettering on the front covers and spines. And although many are now a little tired looking with their colors faded or even grubby and the tops of the spines showing the abuse of fingers grabbing onto them and tilting them out of the shelves they have been sitting on so they could be dusted and cleaned, their text blocks are almost always pristine. The text blocks look like they have sat on their owners’ shelves for 150 years without anyone opening the books or doing anything other than fanning through the pages to see if there were any pictures to look at. These Victorian and Edwardian editions’ only rationale for existing seems to have been to look pretty on a bookshelf but I love them.

I also collect and love the illustrated Chaucers. While Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of The Canterbury Tales in Pictures is a wonderful book that I have found very useful in my collecting, but it doesn’t even hint at the lost, abandoned, or forgotten illustrations and editions such as those of Edmund Dulac, Elizabeth Frink, Charles Mozley, Eunice Young Smith, or Bronislaw Bak. And what about the 1823 W. Greatheed Lewis two volume edition or the 1870 facing page, dual language edition of Frederick Clarke or the 1906 full color Chanticleer of R. Brimley Johnson or the others that have escaped the interest of scholars?

My collection is divided into various categories and many editions fit into more than one category: Illustrated Chaucers, Children’s Chaucers, Chaucer dramatized, Chaucer and music, Victorian and Edwardian Chaucers, Chaucers with decorative covers, Chaucers which deal with a single tale or a small number of tales, translations and modernizations, Chaucers for the classroom, and facsimiles of Chaucer manuscripts and editions. For copies I have only been able to find on the internet, I download the digital files then print out and bind them so I have my own copies. Facsimiles of manuscripts fit into this category and so far I have been able to download and print out fifteen including the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Lansdowne, Petworth, and my favorite: Gg 4.27.1.

In my collection I have books with goffered edges, fore edge paintings, and books that are just unusual and strange. Can you imagine rebinding a Penguin paperback in full-leather with blind stamped designs on both front and back covers and then gilding the edges? It was done, and I have it. But what I love most about my books is that I don’t need to go to the local library or get on a plane to look at an edition or view an illustration. All I have to do is reach out and pull a book off a shelf.

There are a rather large number of translations/retellings/modernized spelling versions that have been lost, forgotten, and ignored like the James Donohue translations. Donohue was a teacher at Loras College who translated Chaucer for his students in the 1950s and 1960s. I find them much more readable than the Coghill translations. And there is the Penny Poets edition of Chaucer translated by Edith Johnstone, which I find is more of a modernized-spelling version than a translation and which was sold at train stations to be read by people on their commute to and from work and home?

I find books mostly by checking both eBay and ABE Books daily. This also gives me a feel for average prices and when something is a good deal or is way over-priced. And as a result of checking every day for more than thirty years, I have been able to acquire more editions of Chaucer, and a wider range of editions than others were able to acquire in a life time of collecting. Of course I don’t get the pleasure of going to England and poking around used bookstores, but I’ve never had the money to travel around the world looking for editions of Chaucer.

My collection is marked by all the excesses, mistakes, and foibles of a true amateur. I even play fast and loose with the definition of what makes an edition. I just leave it undefined in my own mind and if there are differences between one book and another, I list them as two separate editions and don’t bother to do the proper, scholarly, and erudite thing of listing and discussing the variations in the variants and what makes one book a variant and not a new edition.

My collection will never contain a foundation or cornerstone edition. It will never have a single defining book like the Huntington library has with the Ellesmere Chaucer. It will never have an original Caxton, a Wynkyn de Worde, or a Pynson; but I was eventually able to acquire an almost complete copy of the 1550 edition missing only the title page and a few preliminary pages. And as for a Kelmscott Chaucer, until I win the lottery I will have to make do with facsimiles.

I am retired, and if I could afford it, I would go to England and visit the British Library and the Bodleian, but will the British library or the Bodleian let me wander through their stacks in my pajamas at three in the morning like I can in my library?